During the least colorful part of the year, after the Christmas lights are stashed away and before spring flowers blossom, we console ourselves by looking at seed catalogs or a nice blog post about the flowers to come. I’ve heard that people are seeing daffodil sprouts around town, which is exciting. No blooms yet, at least where I am, but the daffodils (and spring) will be here soon! Photograph by Flickr user Gail Johnson.

Daffodils, Narcissus, jonquils, March blooms, these terms all refer to the flower that comes back every spring on roadsides, hills, and flower gardens over a large part of the Northern Hemisphere. They are a part of the Amaryllis family, and many types grow wild. Photograph by Flickr user Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton.

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Good luck with today’s mentalfloss.com Brain Game Think Thursday challenge:

What’s the only U.S. state that is home
to TWO Ivy League schools,
and what are the names of those schools?

Yesterday, we went up the hill, so today’s 5 Question quiz travels Down in the Valley

Beautician Debbie Benton was murdered, and there is more than one suspect. She didn’t like her husband’s sex change, and didn’t even leave him enough cash to pay the hit woman.
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“The enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming.” Werner Herzog delightfully explains how much he hates chickens.
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My Humbling Experience in an MMA Gym. Don’t brag about how tough you are -even to yourself- when going up against a trained fighter.
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When an electrical plant exploded, people in St. Petersburg, Russia, thought Armageddon had come. That’s certainly what the video looks like.
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This geeky marriage proposal out geeks all the others: The question was popped totally in binary code. It took his girlfriend a half-hour to translate it.
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What could be cooler than a compilation of nuclear cooling towers undergoing demolition? Those towers imploding with surprised faces drawn on them!
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Valentine’s Day Drink Recipes. You could call these recipes for disaster, after which you’ll need a drink.
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The problem with outsourcing the military. Overspending, waste, fraud, and security breaches: it’s all about accountability.
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The Horror of Bunnies: 8 Rabbits to Avoid. This may give you bunny nightmares.

Jonathan Coulton is an internet treasure: he makes heartfelt, fun, and often funny music — most of which is available in some legitimately free form online. And he’s a geek like us (he worked in technology for years before quitting to pursue his Modest Rockstar dreams). His latest is Artificial Heart (also available direct from Joco in MP3 format), an album produced by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants. He released official videos for many of the songs on the record; I present them in order of awesomeness below.

Still Alive

With Sara Quin (lead vocals) and Dorit Chrysler (theremin). If you’ve played Portal, you might recognize this one.

Today with Your Wife (live)

With harpist Park Stickney, live in studio. Beautifully ambiguous.

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In Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the caterpillar chows down all kinds of things between the Sunday he’s born and the following Sunday, on which he eats one nice green leaf (and feels much better). Can you name the 15 foods he consumes from Monday to Saturday?

Take the Quiz: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Reader Erica wrote in with a question about oranges. Is the fruit named for its color, or is the color named for the fruit?

Crayon and orange images via Shutterstock

The citrus definitely got named first. The earliest recorded use of orange the fruit in English is from the 1300s and came to us from the Old French orenge, adapted from the Arabic nāranj, from the Persian nārang, from the Sanskrit nāranga (“orange tree”). The Sanskrit word’s origin is unclear, but it might come from a Dravidian word meaning “fragrant.”

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If you’re a regular mental_floss reader, you might remember Eddie’s article about The Day The Clown Cried, the lost Jerry Lewis film. If you just love hearing about movies that you’ll never get to see, check out this great article on io9 featuring a massive list of 24 lost films.

Anything on there you really wish you could watch?

Flipping image via Shutterstock

Don’t bet on it. In 2004, three statisticians from Stanford and UC Santa Cruz set out to test the classic coin flip. Using a mechanical flipper to ensure identical tosses, they chucked thousands of coins into the air and landed on a surprising conclusion. For a hand-tossed coin, there’s a slight bias toward the side it started on landing face up. While the bias only means the coin lands same-side-up 51 percent of the time, that’s still a better bet than anything you’ll find in a casino.

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Commercial breaks are so pre-TiVo, right? No one does anything special during them because, let’s face it, if we’re not watching a live sporting event or something similar, we’re forwarding right through them. But back in the day, commercial breaks were stolen moments when you could quickly get stuff done. Like, go to the bathroom, grab a glass of wine from the kitchen, have a quick chat with the person you were watching the show with, whip off a quick note to someone, address an envelope, mail a letter, make a quick call, read a few pages of a book, do your homework, flip through a magazine… the list was pretty endless. But those moments are now gone.

However, perhaps smartphones and traffic lights have hooked up to create a new kind of commercial break. I’ll be the first to admit that the first thing I do when I hit a red light is reach for my iPhone. There are e-mails to be read! Texts to send! Instagrams to see! Facebook comments to reply to! Tweets to devour! Calendars to check! News headlines to scan! Stock tickers to check! Phone numbers to dial! App updates to initiate…

And I’m not alone. We all do it, right? And what’s more… we all sorta look forward to red lights now in a way that we never did even 3 years ago. The smartphone has changed the way we think about those little inconvenient stops along our route. Now, they’re less inconvenient and maybe even borderline convenient, no? The comments are officially open below. Discuss and prove me wrong.

(photo via nola.com)